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My Mother, My BodyguardThe tug of war behind letting your kid ride the subway alone.

By Emily Bazelon
Posted Friday, April 18, 2008, at 2:17 PM ET
Neil Gilbert's A Mother's Work

In a provoking (in a good way) account in the New York Sun, writer Lenore Skenazy outs herself as a mother who let her 9-year-old son ride home by himself on a New York subway and bus. Yes, he transferred. She reports that her son arrived "ecstatic with independence." And also that half the people she has told "want to turn me in for child abuse." Only half?

Skenazy understands why other parents recoiled at a decision that wasn't all that daring, rationally speaking. It's not simply that parents think of every horrendous kidnapping story and so decide not to take any chance—however tiny—that something unspeakably awful will happen to our children. It's also that, should the worst happen, "We even run a tape of how we'd look on Larry King." There's taking a risk that lies outside the social norm, at least for middle-class families, and then there's taking the fall for taking that chance. It goes without saying, as Skenazy puts it, "These days, when a kid dies, the world—i.e., cable TV—blames the parents. It's simple as that."

So when did the notion of parent-as-bodyguard begin to prevail, and does it connect to the endless tug of war over where and how mothers should spend their time?

According to Peter Stearns' Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America, the idea that a bad parent stood behind every child accident—that there were no accidents, in fact—dates from about the 1920s. Nineteenth-century parenting manuals focused on health, not the risk of accidental calamity, Stearns writes. But, in 1922, people such as journalist and author Ida Tarbell were warning, "By analyzing some of the accidents to children, the mother's responsibility is clear enough. None but she could have prevented them." The timeline matches a small revelation I had when I read my kids the beloved All of a Kind Family books. The series, first published in 1951, is set on New York's Lower East Side in the 1910s. When the family's small son hurts his head badly after playing at a street construction site, his parents are naturally upset. But there's no self-flagellation. They don't berate themselves or even mention their own role, or lack thereof. The norm was so different that I had to stop myself from pointing it out to my kids, who don't really need me to reinforce the notion that it's parents who are at fault.

Why did this incarnation of parental responsibility, so ingrained now, come to life in the 1920s? When I asked my colleague Ann Hulbert this question, she reminded me of Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer's work about how childhood came to seem sacred at this time, because middle-class kids were no longer expected to labor in the cash economy. The turn of the century also marks the rise of the playground movement: Advocates tracked child death and injuries from street-car accidents and started agitating for safer play spaces. Ann also pointed me to a third historical factor: women's suffrage. The 1920s were a time of anxiety about women's roles and how they might infringe on the spheres of men. If mothers could be convinced that they had the power, and the duty, to save their children from all harm, then wouldn't they be more likely to stay at home with them?

I'm not sure how to weigh this question in historical terms, but surely the degree to which we've come to blame parents for accidents is part of what pulls women toward home and away from work when they have children. Or so I thought as I read and found myself arguing with A Mother's Work: How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Shape Family Life, a new book by Neil Gilbert, a UC Berkeley professor of social welfare. Gilbert's argument is that feminism and the unyielding demands of employers have propelled women away from taking care of their small children during the day and toward jobs that they don't necessarily like much. Gilbert thinks that "an intellectual elite of well-paid professional women" make paid work seem better than it is for many women, and household work more "servile, tedious, mind-numbing."

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Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.
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